Some critics of the Book of Mormon point
to the characters one finds on the
Anton Transcript are based on English letters and numbers, so, instead of
reflecting “reformed Egyptian” but “Deformed English.”
On p. 539 of Charles Shook's book, Cumorah
Revisited (1910), we find the following comparison between the characters
on the Anthon Transcript and English characters:
Writing in response to the "Deformed English" argument, D. Charles Pyle wrote the following in response, "proving" that Demotic Egyptian script should be considered "Deformed English" too(!):
Are not the
characters really just “deformed English” as Shook, and others after him, have
claimed to demonstrate?
Flipping the letters around and matching
up the characters with English letters (as some have done over the years) also
proves absolutely nothing with regard to whether or not the badly-copied,
multi-generational copies in the extant manuscript fragment are derived from
Egyptian characters. One can take known Demotic Egyptian characters and do the
very same thing. For example, if we believed the claims of the critics and
applied them virtually to just about any transcription of Demotic Egyptian, we
could do the same and pronounce Demotic as deformed English. In fact, this is
what I have done as an example below. All of the characters are taken from the
following transcription published in Gardiner’s Egyptian Grammar.
Now, for the English sentence made with
some of the above Demotic characters.
Claiming that “Demotic is really deformed
English” is about as valid as claiming the same thing for the characters in the
document fragment that once was believed to be the Anthon Transcript, and which
document fragment we now know is not the Anthon Transcript as a result of
finding a photo of more of the document in a museum.
. . .
The first few characters appear to mean “Regnal year 1…of (?) ka (?)” (or, in flowing English, “In the first year…of the reign of (?) ka (?)…”). Could this be a reference to Zedekiah?
With this probably being the ‘ka’ phoneme.
And this referring to the Egyptian phrase meaning “regnal year….”:
After this name and date information is the determinative for a divinity or element of a divine name.
And after these is a symbol representing some familial relationship, such as sonship.
Several times the words meaning “this book” are present.
This:
…is “book, document.” And this:
…is nn or “this.” The following apparently is the phoneme mn.
And, there is a character that indicates “lands” in the plural.
The following is an important royal and/or religious name but it is so badly copied that it is not decipherable at all.
And there is possibly a form representing “forever” or otherwise relating to time.
Other than that, this is all we have at the moment.
